I’ve Moved To My Own Website: AndrewAPeterson.com

Please continue corresponding with me through my new site.  

HERE

It’s seriously so hard to move.  So many little things that I can’t move.   For instance I can’t make it so my comments take you to my new blog.  Ughh!  So frustrating.

rel=”spam” rel=”mal” MicroFormat for Spam? rel=”???”

IDEA: A MicroFormat for when it may be necessary to link to a Malicious, Dangerous, or Unethical Site?

Funny, the first thing that came to mind was using rel=”spam”  …but really what brought this up was a site that isn’t necessarily “Spam” in the traditional sense.  The site was a pyramid scheme, the operators of which were posting ads on my local craigslist for “social media” something or other.  This isn’t by definition, Spam.

The Wikipedia currently says:

“Spamming is the abuse of electronic messaging systems to indiscriminately send unsolicited bulk messages…”

The quantity is what makes spam spam, not the uselessness of what’s being promoted.

Maybe rel=”mal” as in malicious??

I’m not the only one thinking about this idea.

Kevin Kelly on the Next 5,000 Days of the Internet-TED, 2007:

Kevin Kelly gave this talk at TED in 2007.  It’s worth watching.  

He touches on a number of things ranging from history of the Internet and Moore’s Law to the future ubiquity of Cloud Computing and Kurzweil’s “Sigularity.“ 

He covers concepts like the Semantic Web, and the give-and-take between privacy and participation with relatively light language that any lay person should be able to understand.  This is an interesting and entertaining little presentation.  Thought I’d share.

How Will I Organize My Tags? An App? MOAT? A Feature in Delicious?

Here’s my dilemma. I have a ton of bookmarks on my Del.icio.us account.  I love using an online bookmarking system. But still, Delicious and others’ systems for organizing bookmarks don’t really help with a need I bet most users have: Tag-Optimization.  

What we need are tools for analyzing and perfecting the organizing of bookmarks.  Every one of these systems like Delicious, Furl, StumbleUpon etc, have the same problem: user-submitted tags are bug-y!!! The engine of the platform needs to guide the users toward better tagging!  Basically, we need built-in systems for finding the types of redundancies and other tag-errors that we all have. We need debugging software, so our bookmarks can become good, clean representations of how web-users feel about various web resources.  ”Suggested Tags” and “Popular Tags” are great time-saving features but I’d like to also have a tool for correcting tag-cancer.  

These software offerings, if/when they finally exist, are going to make it increasingly more easy to harmonize user-submitted value from folksonomies with the ‘Semantic Web,’ which is right around the corner.

 

Some examples of areas where I think a robot could help users to clean up tags are:

• Redundant Tags. Usually just alternate tenses of the same word (like the plural and singular form) but also synonyms. Example: Image, Images, Picture, Pictures, Pix
• Arbitrary Capitalization. HTML vs html etc.
• Vagueness. Like los or awesome (wouldn’t it be safe to assume that all the things you bookmark are ‘awesome’ to you?’). 

This is a screen-shot of my tagging screen from Delicious.  I added the red scribbling to point out just a few of the problems my tags have.

Del.Icio.Us Tags Gone Wild

On several occasions, I’ve set out to clean up my tags manually, but I’ve never made it very far.  It’s just too much work.

Maybe the coming overhaul to Del.Icio.Us will ad some of these needed features, although somehow I doubt it.

I’ve heard of the MOAT (Meaning Of A Tag) Project, and perhaps this could save us, but like many other ‘Semantic Web’ projects, I haven’t found a way, as a lay person, to utilize it.  At some point down te road,  maybe someone will make a Delicious-MOAT-erizer Web-App that will clean-up-shop-by-proxy and make the metadata available to the Semantic Web.

Video: Semantic Web, Faceted Browsing, Etc (google talks)

Semantic Web Isn’t As Semantic As NLP, Web 3.0 Hype Overload Too!

 

This a comment I posted on the Nodalities blog (or I think I posted it.  The form submit resulted in a blank page) 

Quote:

It’s ironic, really, that the Semantic Web should struggle so much with semantics!

The problem is that if we present a mixed, complicated, and difficult concept forward, the journalists and media commentators are not going to be able to sort out the tangle of meanings for us. They will present an (over)simplified, half-understood message to the rest of the world. When even a brilliant communicator like Tim Berners-Lee’s message gets scrambled, maybe it’s time to take stock in how we present the Semantic Web, especially to the general media. Maybe, a set of metaphors could help us present these:

The semantic web is a platform (one we already use frequently)! The semantic web is a layer of connectivity (like a concentric ring around the web itself). The semantic web is a series (more than one thing) of enablers (it makes possible, rather than it does)

(me:)

I think there’s a big problem, obviously, with the phrase “Semantic Web.”

It’s easy for Press to confuse the intentions of SemWeb with those of Natural Language Processing.

Talk about ironic:

NLP is really more about human “semantics” than The Semantic Web is.  SemWeb technologies are only really semantic by comparison to the HTML-Web, and they’re only really “semantic” from a MarkUp/database/programming point of view, and still, only in comparison to older/existing systems.

As Tim Berners-Lee has pointed out, the name “Semantic Web” wasn’t the best choice of names, but it’s too late to change it.  “The Data Web” or “Web Of Data” or “Linked Data Web” or many other names for it would be more accurate and less conducive to misrepresentation than “The Semantic Web” is.  But “Semantic Web” has already stuck, and I doubt anyone is going to change it.  

Fortunately, “The Semantic Web” sounds lofty enough for people to think it probably is going to be the next big thing.  Unfortunately, the name is deceiving to most people and the technologies would probably seem more or less trivial to them anyhow.  

SemWeb is a movement that would ideally be taking place among inspired, pro-active developers, but unfortunately, devs are too comfortable with the tools at hand and there’s no visible eminent market force in the development field pushing for movement beyond the same old skill-sets and practices on the ground, at least for most businesses and the programmers they hire..  For this reason, we should be glad about all the “Web 3.0″ hype, and work to inform the press and the public between the lines where and when we can.

For those of us that understand what “The Semantic Web” is, it is our duty to evangelize RDF and MicroFormats where and when we can.

Soon we will be forgotten.  Soon we wont need to call the “semantic web” anything so this conversation will be meaningless… I hope.

I Don’t Want FaceBook Comcast To Buy Plaxo

Update… this was actually news back in January.  Coincidentally, today it was announced that Comcast is buying Plaxo.  Goodbye Plaxo.  Nice knowin’ ya.

Got the rumor tip from Scoble (there’s no real info there so don’t bother)

Plaxo? Are you listening?  Keep doing what you’re doing, stay behind the scenes, work on enabling users to publish their own data, at will, in Semantic Standards as they become timely (now?) and stay independent of the little tug-of-war between closed, albeit increasingly API-enabled social apps.   You’re better than them!  Hang in there and you’ll be worth way more!  Don’t turn to the dark side!

Competition for traffic will get everyone using RDF and Microformats soon enough…  Semantics are like SEO 2.0… The next bandwagon everyone will want to pay way too much for.

Plaxo, you’re in the perfect spot to make money on this.  Think Virtual Private Networks, Semantic Publishing to the Web, and Semantic Productivity Tools at home.

Seriously.  

Usefulness of DataPortability.org’s Rel=Me project

In the suggested reading section of the page for the DIY Rel=”Me” project over at dataportability.org’s wiki, There’s a link to this blog post, which is an attempt to explore the usefulness of rel=”me” to the regular old web user.  The article is slightly tunnel-visioned at what you can or can’t do with your browser to exploit MicroFormats.  Of course, being able to detect locations or personal contact info thru a browser extension is useful and I’m all for it, but beyond a few obvious exceptions like those, The Semantic Web, MicroFormats included, wont be much use to us at the level of the browser.  We will still need Web based portals or “Libraries” or “repositories” or “Catalogs” or what have you, to connect to, in order to really take advantage of this stuff.  Semantic markup on pages is great. RSS is an example of how a little bit of semantics can go a long way.  But what’s of greater significance is the idea of the Web Of Data, where resources are “semantically” interconnected, by leveraging information that’s mapped to the domain of knowledge where it’s useful and the relationships between resources are also specified in a machine-understandable way.

Rel=”me” is the equivalent of saying “The person represented by this URL is the same person as the person represented by this other URL.”  Taking that into consideration, imagine how this would effect the experience of searching the “Web of Documents.”  I argue that if enough of us implement rel=”me” (or other microformats or RDFa) in our HTML pages, we will empower the Googles and Yahoos to take advantage to knowledge expressed by this markup.  So let’s do it!  

Quotes from the Article I mentioned:

“…So assuming that you went through the trouble to write up your HTML with rel=me, what next, where is that information actually consumed. I don’t think the 2 most popular browsers (IE 7 and Firefox 2) at this time have native support for XFN, I hear Firefox 3 is suppose to have native microformat support but I haven’t looked for it and if it is there, it isn’t immediately obvious to me. The closest thing I can find is a Firefox plugin called Operator. Operator is a microformat capable reader and for the most part seems to be able to consume most of the above microformat standards except rel=me, kind of odd but kind of understandable…”

“…At this time, I can honestly say that XFN rel=me proliferation is limited and experimental at best. It would take a while for mass adoption to happen and requires a lot of user education, adoption by popular social sites like Facebook, MySpace, etc, and native browser support…”

 

I commented there and when I take the time to write a long comment out, that isn’t something I’ve already written in so many words here, I like to steal my own comment and put it here for anyone who reads my blog.  My response:

I felt like I had to chime in and point out that the point of MicroFormats or RDFa isn’t really to make an overnight change in how we use the Web. It’s to create a backbone of linked data so that as Search Engines and other “Libraries” begin to have stores of these relationships between documents and other resources available to work with, they can begin to improve their services. It will be nice when Search is only partly based on scanning for text-strings or combinations of words.

If you were looking for Andrew in Sebastopol, CA, how would you do it? Perhaps you’d google “Andrew Sebastopol CA…”
But what if you could specify that you are looking for a person?
What if you could specify geocoding info or otherwise specify that Sebastopol is a town in Northern California?
What if you could filter your results by the time web-pages were created or filter by domain specifications (like show me wiki articles first or show me all MySpace profiles) or filter by type of site like say, show me blogs only, and finally, and this is where rel=”me” comes in, what if you could specify in your search results that you want to see every other document that is an expression of the same person, once you have selected from your query, a person named Andrew who lives in Sebastopol, CA? This is what it’s all about. It works because links work backward. In other words, you can already say “show me all the pages that link to this thing…” but what about being able to say “show me all the pages linking to this Twitter page that link using rel=”me” or better yet, show me all the pages linked to with rel=”me” from any page that links to this twitter page with rel=”me” …And so on…

The Web is becoming a library. By adding microformats and other semantic markup to our documents, we are making it possible for decent “card-catalogues” to be built, whether they’re being built by google, yahoo! or the guy down the street.

DataPortability In Motion Podcast

A weekly roundtable discussion about the DataPortability Project in specific, and efforts involved in data portability in general. The show is produced and hosted by J. Trent Adams and Steve Greenberg.

PodCast is HERE

 

I recommend Episode 7 

QUOTE:

We kick off episode 7 of the DataPortability: In-Motion Podcast with the news of the week that MySpace launched “Data Availability” with Yahoo!, eBay, Photobucket, and Twitter. Following immediately on their heels was the announcement that Facebook is releasing “Facebook Connect”, an extension of their 3rd party API providing deeper access to their user’s data.

 

We’re also joined by Brady Brim-Deforest, founder of Human Global Media, talking about the DataPortability Legal Entity Taskforce. He provides a good overview and update on the process underway to formalize the the project under a recognized legal banner.

The featured interview segment is with Danny Ayers, Semantic Web Developer at Talis. He touches on moving from document linking, through microformats, to feature-rich RDF modeling to identify portable data. Contrary to popular belief, he dispels the myth that it’s hard to migrate from a standard SQL data representation into addressable semantic objects.

Danny regularly posts on the following sites:

• Talis: N2 Blog
• Talis: Nodalities Blog
• This Week’s Semantic Web
• DannyAyers.com
• DataPortability & Me Video

Also mentioned in the episode:

• Semantic Tech Conference (Danny is speaking)
• Talis: Semantic Platform
• Tim Berners-Lee’s Giant Global Graph post
• Tabulator data browser

 

Planet RDF

Apture! Multiple Resources From One Link. This is Really Cool.

I heard about this through Lawrence Lessig’s blog. Professor Lessig is taking the month of May off, and off the grid, which I applaud him for.

What this web app does is allow you to make links that, through the free Apture service for your site, link to numerous resources, all previewable via the same sort of javascript popup you get from Snap or the ZitGist “zLinks” plugin.

You must see this in action. This is inspiring. It shows how much more dynamic web pages can and will be in the near future. I’m a bit sick of the over-use of javascript, ajax, whatever you want to call it. It tends to be resource-heavy on your machine. This is an exception.

I wonder if these guys are going to implement any Semantic technologies into the data they store… I wonder if they’re going to make deals with bookmarking services like del.icio.us… All my words could automatically be links to mini-libraries of items I’ve bookmarked! It’d look a little ugly given the current style conventions but hey. Let’s change those.

It’s interesting to me to ponder how this non-semantic-web service, because it’s also a library/bookmarking tool, could become hugely useful to the Semantic Web as they snatch up web user’s resources/web-bibliographies.

Oh man. This is a hot item!

(video)DataPortability and Me (Get Your Data Out!) Danny Ayers Rockin Out

Great job, Danny. That’s funny.

“wrote an interesting post today” SEO, Evil Robots and One Sad Outcome of Non-Semantics in Spam-Control/Search

I’ve mentioned before how increasingly the ‘Live Web’ or ‘Blogosphere’ (or whatever you want to call this thing) is being infiltrated by Robot Blogs. What they appear to be doing is crawling the web and scraping excerpts of blog posts and reposting the excerpts, linking back to where it came from. They usually say:

“[KeyWord] wrote an interesting post today”

Since they link back to the blog post they scraped, they show up as a trackback in the comments area of the original post. This way, the unsuspecting blogger is linking to the fake blog. The fake blogs seem to be set up in an attempt at monetizing traffic via adsense ads.

I googled the phrase “wrote an interesting post today” and the top hit was (I probably am the top hit now) some blogger talking about filtering any comment that contains the phrase “wrote an interesting post today.”

I had decided to change my little tagline thingy to this exact phrase as a sort of inside joke for bloggers, but found myself wondering if being associated with that phrase will adversely effect my findability. Perhaps Search Engines or Spam Filters will begin to look out for that phrase?

Already, I bet there are tons of bloggers who filter out comments containing words like “viagra” or “casino,” assuming that there is absolutely no context in which these words could be used in a legitimate discussion. The fact that I am using those words here is proof that there is such a thing as a legitimate discussion which contains them.

Filtering for a word or phrase seems to me to be a slippery slope, especially if we’re talking about Search Engines, since they act as our main interface to the Web.

Google: Please don’t hate me because I said Viagra. I’m not a spammer.

PHP Application Turns MySpace Friends Into CSV – View/Mine in Excel Spreadsheet Etc

My friend threw together an app that scrapes your MySpace contacts and puts useful info into a reusable format.

DOWNLOAD IT HERE. (ZIP FILE)

UPDATE: It’s also available as a Torrent via The Pirate Bay. Please consider seeding this. It’s a tiny, tiny file.

Here’s the Read Me info I just put together to go with it:

“LOGIN_EMAIL”
and
“PASSWORD”
and change those.
LEAVE THE QUOTES IN PLACE
Save the file.
Upload these two files to your server.
point your web browser to http://where-you-put-the-file-on-your-server/ms_test.php
and what will result is a CSV file of all your MySpace friends and their demographic information. Also included is the URLs to “send message” etc, and some other useful things.
View the source of the page and copy it into a PlainText text file
Name the text file with the extension .csv
Now you should be able to work with your myspace friends in Excel

There is nothing malicious about this simple application. No viruses, spyware etc. It only does what it’s supposed to do: scrape your friends so you can more easily work with your social network data.

If you are of the camp that feels that people scraping their own myspace contacts is unethical, I suggest that you consider that all the pages are already available and the data they contain is rendered in HTML which can be freely accessed already. This is just a tool to make it easier to get the useful data separated from the clutter.

Finally, this is possibly against MySpace’s Terms Of Service, so use at your own risk.

Talis’ Podcast Goes the TWiT Route: The Semantic Web Gang

Semantic Web Gang: Introductory Episode

Some suggestions:

1. During the conference call, use some sort of mixing program so the moderator can see who is talking at every moment during the recording via an audio level meter and make adjustments as needed.

2. Whenever some body new starts talking, quickly talk over them stating their name (it only obscures what they’re saying for one or two syllables so it’s easy for the listener to understand what they’re saying while taking in the metadata too)

3. Have a rotating or otherwise changing schedule of guests like TWiT does.  The occasional random apperence by a CEO or two, or other dignitaries of the Web might help to keep the discussion interesting.

4. Don’t be afraid to spend a few hundred pounds on a decent microphone and maybe a mixer or or whatever is needed to improve the quality of the audio.  The audio of Talking With Talis has been piss poor since the beginning.  It would really serve you guys to improve on that.

I think part of your mission is evangelism, so I hate to think you’re losing audience because of the poor audio quality.

Looking forward to more!

-A

 

 

The Web Has Always Been a Semantic Web

We started with the semantics of document structure. That’s what the World Wide Web is made of. It’s a giant network of HTML pages linking to each other. HTML (Hyper-Text Markup Language) documents have titles, links, headings and other elements that allow us to see web pages the way we do today. The whole idea of a “Hyper-Text” is referring to the power of a form of semantics. It is a matter of semantics that we see <a>this</a> as a link and
<h2>

this

</h2>
as a heading. It is the semantics of document structure a.k.a, HTML that have made it possible for documents like this one to link to others and for all of these pages that make up the Web to be rendered by our computers in more or less the same way.

The Idea of “The Semantic Web” is really only necessary for the sake of comparison.

So to sort out the semantics of what we’re talking about when we use the word “semantic” with regard to the Web, The Semantic Web refers to a movement toward not just semantics that define the structure of documents or pages, but semantics being applied to how information is made available over the Net.

Recent trends in the Web’s growth are making computer-language standards for compartmentalizing domains of data. The Semantic Web is a movement toward not just using semantics for defining document structure, but using semantics to make declarations about the context in which a linked resource or bit of information can be useful.

Yahoo! Says Search is “Killer App” or The Semantic Web

Maybe it’s a bit silly to say that there’s “a Killer App (as in one)” for Semantics.  Nonetheless, Yahoo! announcing its search results will soon be taking advantage of Semantic Web Standards is definitely great news.  Quote from the Yahoo! Search Blog:

“In the coming weeks, we’ll be releasing more detailed specifications that will describe our support of semantic web standards. Initially, we plan to support a number of microformats, including hCard, hCalendar, hReview, hAtom, and XFN. Yahoo! Search will work with the web community to evolve the vocabulary framework for embedding structured data. For starters, we plan to support vocabulary components from Dublin Core, Creative Commons, FOAF, GeoRSS, MediaRSS, and others based on feedback. And, we will support RDFa and eRDF markup to embed these into existing HTML pages. Finally, we are announcing support for the OpenSearch specification, with extensions for structured queries to deep web data sources.”

Hmmm.  Wasn’t I just saying something about Semantics having an effect on Search Results in the near future?  I guess Yahoo! doesn’t think that’s such a crazy idea.

Imagine that.  Standards for defining the context in which information can be used actually being used to help search engines provide users with more relevant results.  What a concept!

And on the SEO and SEM front, can you guess what Google, AOL, MSN and all the others are probably working on right now?

Semantic Standards are Sustainable SEO for You, Your Business & Website

Big Rant.

Using HTML was once a smart move for findability online.   Seems obvious to us now, but in case you don’t realize how stupid people were during the initial growth of the Web back in the late nineties, imagine this: People used to send cease and desist or take-down letters to owners of other sites because the other sites were linking to them.

“How dare you link to my site!  You have no right to mention my existence and if you do not remove the link, I will sue you!”

In other words, we have a hard time looking beyond the current paradigm.  Right now that paradigm is something like, in order to be findable, spend a lot of time working with the wording of your site’s copy, and make sure your metadata and you document structure are written to reflect what search results you want to win.

It’s funny though: Still, one of the best things you can do SEO wise is to have an RSS feed.  And in case you didn’t realize this, RSS is a Semantic Standard.  Apparently RSS 2.0 is a little convoluted (the adjustments made to the standard since it’s creation are not entirely in line with the Semantic Web school), but the original RSS stood for RDF Site Summary.  Blah blah blah.  Go look it up.
A little bit of Semantics is potentially way better for your site’s visibility than a whole lot Keyword tweaking.

FOAF, SIOC and the countless other Semantic Markups are a way for you to get your foot in the door now!  A bit like the people that realized early on that they needed to have a website at all in the first place.

A little bit of early adoption of Semantics for your information could really pay off as we start moving toward a smarter Web.  And we are moving toward a smarter Web.  Who will be part of it when it reaches it’s tipping point for large scale adoption?  Will you or your business?  Or will you wait until some news report announces that the rest of the world has already gone semantic? I know I’ll be there.  I already am.

Because what Search Engines are trying to do is provide users with access to what users are looking for, the process of SEO, when it consists of tweaking Keywords and/or document structure around, according to whatever the latest rumors are on what silly and temporary way Google seems to  be currently making decisions about relevance,  is always going to be flawed and as long as these SEO rumors are floating around, people will be trying to game the engines and in turn, people are collectively increasing the need for the engines to change their parameters, repeat, repeat, repeat.  Search engines do not try to index sites based on the sites’ application of SEO techniques, engines index sites based on an attempt at creating an Information Architecture… This is hard to do because most website aren’t presented in a architecture-y way.  So we’ve come full circle.  Feeds are an architecture-y way to present your content, so it’s no wonder they help with SEO.

You might ask “So what’s next beyond RSS?  How can I make Google love me even more?”

My answer is: “Stop lying to them with your SEO, and start helping them with Semantics”

And just remember what happened when a little bit of semantics got put into effect?  Remember RSS?  Well the blogosphere basically happened and in turn the “Live Web,” Podcasting and all that.  Powerful stuff, and Web 2 is just the tip of the iceburg.

A letter To Lawrence Lessig: Government Websites

This post is aimed at one of my personal heroes, Professor Lawrence Lessig.

Mr Lessig,

First, I want to thank you for all the work you’ve done already to spread awareness about ‘Net Neutrality,’ the need for Intellectual Property reform, ‘Free Culture’ and so on. Your name comes up often as I do my part to help to change the way people think about the ownership of ideas and/or culture, no doubt because many of my thoughts on these matters are derivatives of yours. And finally, as an artist, thank you for helping me to see past my own possessive instincts, and to understand that my creative efforts are best honored if I aim for my work to become part of the Public Domain, because it is there that I can really contribute to the shape of our culture in the future. So thank you. Please keep up the good work.

It occurred to me that you may be the perfect person to spearhead the solving of a problem our government has -a small problem with major consequences. Before I go on though, I just want to urge you not to take this letter the wrong way. I don’t mean to imply that you need people like me to help you to choose your battles. But I know of no one else in the public eye that is such an advocate for the people, and who also seems to understand the implications of digital communication via the Web. You are the only public figure I can think of that generally seems to take the people’s side in all the domains where this issue manifests itself: The need for transparency in government; The need for people to be able to navigate the law to some degree without the aid of lawyers; The importance and potential of the [Read/Write] Web, especially with regard to how it can and does make our Democracy more democratic; etc… You actually seem to understand what the Web is and why it is important, and I fear that many or most of our legislators, judges and executives do not. This is why I’m writing to you.

The problem is that government websites generally lack consistency, search-ability, interactivity and general user-friendliness. On the surface, this may seem to many people like a minor problem. But from my point of view, it is one of the most important manifestations of how our government doesn’t work for the average person. This is a huge opportunity to improve how our democracy works for us.

Here are some of my thoughts on this.

1. Government websites generally have no interoperability between them. It seems to me that government websites should share a common information infrastructure as well as a common basic user interface and query system. If I am looking for information on something like a law on one government site, like say a county, I should be able to expand my search to include less local results, like say the state I am in, or narrow my search to only include more local results, like the City I am in. I think that government sites should be hierachically connected wherever possible to say the very least.

In general, I think it is time for all official government agency websites to become integrated.

2. Government websites do not routinely take advantage of technologies that make it easy for us to get new information from them. With technologies like RSS and iCal, it seems that citizens should be able to access regular updates from all the government agencies that concern them. We should be able to anonymously subscribe to feeds of governmental news, events, changes in policy, Etc. Example: “Effective today: All automobiles must have headlights turned on when it is raining regardless of the time of day. See Vehicle Code XYZ Section abc.”

3. By allowing existing laws to be un-findable, our government excludes us from even being able to understand what we have supposedly agreed upon through a democratic process.

For instance, on many occasions, I have tried to find out the specifics of one law or another. I have gone to my City, County and State government websites hoping for my question to be answered by a quick search, but instead, I’ve found myself hours later with a ton of windows open still trying to figure out the answer to a specific question like “Is [somehting] against the law?”

Again, to some people this may seem like a trivial complaint, but how in the world are we supposed to be law-abiding citizens if we cannot even be sure what the laws are? I believe that most people, in most communities in the USA have a very vague understanding of what is and isn’t legal. To many of us, The Law acts like some sort of urban mythology. We have no idea what the law actually says, and we cannot find the law if we want to learn what it actually says.

I have even had conversations with law enforcement officers in which the officers assured me that I “Can’t do” something, but were unable to tell me what the law says, where it says it, whether it is a local, state or federal law that is in question, or where I could even begin to look to find out for myself. This is scary to me.

I understand that Laws themselves are often confusing to lay persons. But I don’t understand why it is so hard to even find Laws in the first place. We have the technology to vastly improve this situation. It must be improved.

4 . Government websites generally have no place for public discussion or comment. There is also generally no universal protocol for asking the government(s) questions through the Web. Really, there is practically no way to reliably get facts about policy from government agencies in general. Since we clearly have the technology to make it possible for citizens to interact with and get information from government agencies, while keeping the expense to taxpayers very low, shouldn’t this be imperative?

So those are some of my main ideas about the digital government interface. Perhaps it is time for it to become written into law that certain standards and improvements are implemented on all government websites. Indeed, if there are already legally binding standards in place for government websites, they need to be vastly improved.

If technologies like RSS along with Semantic Web technologies were taken advantage of by government agencies, they could lead to vast improvements in our ability to understand and take part in our democracy.

Mr. Lessig, I wanted to write this to you because I don’t know where else to turn with these ideas. I hope you get this, and if you do, I hope you understand why I wrote this to you, rather than, say, The President or Santa Clause.

Of course, I am more than willing to help with this cause in any way that I can.

Sincerely,

Andrew A. Peterson

Trying to Manage My Social Graph – So Much Work!

Some steps I’m taking to get all my contacts in order:

• Syncing my phone with my Desktop Address Book using iSync.  (Unfortunately, my phone, a Nokia 6126 isn’t supported by iSync so I had to find a hack to make it work)
• Installing Plaxo’s extension for AddressBook on my computer so I can take advantage of Plaxo’s syncing service
• Setting up Plaxo to retrieve as much info about the people I know as possible from the various online services on which we are connected.
• Manually attempting to find redundancies in this master-list of connections and fix them.  I have multiple incomplete address cards for many people, often with each one containing different pieces of the puzzle.  Also, I wanto to include MySpace URL’s and Blogs that aren’t discoverable using Plaxo or any of the other tools I have at my disposal. I guess I have to do this more or less manually.
• Re-Syncing with Plaxo then Re-Syncing with my phone.
• With a few exceptions, I’m not going to include people who I’ve only met online thru Social Networks Etc.
• Publishing this data, Minus Private information like emails addresses and phone numbers in Semantic Formats like FOAF, XFN Etc.  I wonder about how other people would fee about the ethics of this.  I’ve decided that since I’m not revealing anything that isn’t already findable on the public web, via a MySpace search etc, it isn’t unethical even though many of the people I know might haven’t thought through what the implications are of participating in the Social Web.  I am going to take special care to not reveal blog sites and other things that people I know are doing anonymously.
• This will probably take me a few days at least and I’m not looking forward to the work.

SIOC Should be Called SIOD. Discussions, not Communities, Right?

SIOC (pronounced “shock”) stands for Semantically Interlinked Online Communities. It’s the emerging standard for distributing forum and blog discussions, if I’m understanding it right. Considering the possibilities of this, I think of trackbacks on steroids.

Here’s the example of SIOC from the Wikipedia

I think the C in SIOC is a little misleading.

I Scraped My MySpace Friends. Scrape Yours!

Is there a way to download MySpace Friends? Not officially.I used “O-Community” to scrape my friends out of myspace and I used TextWrangler to turn the file into a series of <a> tags within <li> tags that include the XFN rel=”friend” attribute. I will be looking into how I might publish this information in a more relevant structure/format, probably as SIOC or FOAF data, if I can figure out how to do that.

I wish FaceBook & MySpace allowed you to download a spreadsheet (excel or whatever) of all your contacts and their demographic information like Age, Gender, Location Etc. Some other formats I would like to be able to download my contacts in are RDF/XML, vCard, CSV Etc…

Actually, it is explicitly against MySpace’s and FaceBook’s Terms Of Service to do what I have done here. Scripts and Bots are prohibited. Perhaps this will change some bright beautiful day in the future.

We need to be able to mine the ‘Data of Our Lives,’ including of course the contacts we make through Social Software services. We also need to be able to Back-Up all our Data.

If you would like help scraping your MySpace friends, drop me a line and maybe I can help out.

1. retard a ..
2. no profile
3. Matthew
4. Leandra
5. Matt
6. Giraffe
7. Arin Crumley
8. Susan Buice
9. Elijah
10. Big Love
11. John
12. OG Readmore
13. Kim
14. Four Eyed..
15. aletia
16. JB
17. Tom
18. hachurui
19. Ehly
20. Bianca Ba..
21. philipb
22. johnny
23. Vodka Tan..
24. Stephanie
25. Stefi
26. alien
27. tamiko
28. kefentse
29. sonja
30. Sonoma Co..
31. Miss White
32. Jamal
33. Chicago U..
34. Alexandra
35. Molly
36. monkey gl..
37. RUN
38. Mandy
39. GODFATHER
40. connie
41. The Datas..
42. P.P.A.M
43. mikehedge..
44. megadethk..
45. Cat
46. molecules
47. Simply Pa..
48. First Tim..
49. Jessica E..
50. Sarah Miller
51. rigel. th..
52. Erik
53. EVERYBODY..
54. bad kissers
55. Aaron
56. Velvet Ha..
57. Malik
58. brian
59. wei
60. selena
61. RADFORD
62. marissa

I Scraped My MySpace Friends. Scrape Yours!

Is there a way to download MySpace Friends? Not officially.I used “O-Community” to scrape my friends out of myspace and I used TextWrangler to turn the file into a series of <a> tags within <li> tags that include the XFN rel=”friend” attribute. I will be looking into how I might publish this information in a more relevant structure/format, probably as SIOC or FOAF data, if I can figure out how to do that.

I wish FaceBook & MySpace allowed you to download a spreadsheet (excel or whatever) of all your contacts and their demographic information like Age, Gender, Location Etc. Some other formats I would like to be able to download my contacts in are RDF/XML, vCard, CSV Etc…

Actually, it is explicitly against MySpace’s and FaceBook’s Terms Of Service to do what I have done here. Scripts and Bots are prohibited. Perhaps this will change some bright beautiful day in the future.

We need to be able to mine the ‘Data of Our Lives,’ including of course the contacts we make through Social Software services. We also need to be able to Back-Up all our Data.

If you would like help scraping your MySpace friends, drop me a line and maybe I can help out.

1. retard a ..
2. no profile
3. Matthew
4. Leandra
5. Matt
6. Giraffe
7. Arin Crumley
8. Susan Buice
9. Elijah
10. Big Love
11. John
12. OG Readmore
13. Kim
14. Four Eyed..
15. aletia
16. JB
17. Tom
18. hachurui
19. Ehly
20. Bianca Ba..
21. philipb
22. johnny
23. Vodka Tan..
24. Stephanie
25. Stefi
26. alien
27. tamiko
28. kefentse
29. sonja
30. Sonoma Co..
31. Miss White
32. Jamal
33. Chicago U..
34. Alexandra
35. Molly
36. monkey gl..
37. RUN
38. Mandy
39. GODFATHER
40. connie
41. The Datas..
42. P.P.A.M
43. mikehedge..
44. megadethk..
45. Cat
46. molecules
47. Simply Pa..
48. First Tim..
49. Jessica E..
50. Sarah Miller
51. rigel. th..
52. Erik
53. EVERYBODY..
54. bad kissers
55. Aaron
56. Velvet Ha..
57. Malik
58. brian
59. wei
60. selena
61. RADFORD
62. marissa

Linked Data is Growing Up!!

I love these Semantic Web diagrams and flow-charts that folks keep drawing up.  They help me to stay excited.

This one is from Michael K. Bergman’s post, “Linked Data Comes of Age.”

Sorry for the shallow post.  I do love the chart though.  I mean by all means go read the article… Cool stuff is happening.  There’s going to be the first ever Linked Data Planet Expo in NYC among other things mentioned there.  Feels like momentum!
…and I like the pictures.

Zitgist Browser or “zLinks” Plugin for WordPress – Semantics In Action

Some discussion about the concept can be found on Frederick Giasson’s blog.  He’s the developer of the plugin.

It behaves similarly to the Snap Shots Plugin, the thing that makes the slick little preview windows show up when you hover over the links in this site, but rather than an image of the site being linked to, zLinks shows you a list of semantically curated resources.  Hell yeah!

To see the plugin in action, check out the blogs of Daniel Lewis, Michal K. Bergman or of course, Frederick Giasson.

Great Idea, Brad Fitzpatrick!

thanks for the heads up, Mike Hedge

Brad Fitzpatrick of LiveJournal posted a blog about the idea of mapping email addresses to URL’s.

A protocol for making it so for anyone who has your email address, you can give them access to a specific URL automatically. This could be a homepage etc, or it could also be an RDF file, if I’m understanding this correctly.

Great idea.

Imagine all your contacts knowing where to find you! Imagine knowing where to find all your contacts! Access is controlled by whether or not we know one-another’s email addresses.

Maybe I give out one email to my closest friends and another to more peripheral social connections or business contacts… They get access to different URL’s and in turn, different information.

I love it.